These few days I’ve really been playing around with WordPress, using it as the backend system running a couple of sites, and it is really a great and fast system to get started as a simple CMS to manage a few pages.
However, as some of the sites grew more complicated, I also realised I’m stretching WordPress too far as a CMS. It is afterall, built to be a blogging platform, not a full fledged CMS. Managing user roles in WordPress, for example, would require you to really dig into the WordPress source code (which I haven’t figured out!).
As much as plugins can stretch the functionality of WordPress, I guess WordPress really needs to remain as a blogging platform, or a CMS for a very simple site, for more “content management” than “publishing”, it might be good to look into Joomla!… and for shopping carts, osCommerce might make a good bet.
So these are the two systems I’m going to do my best to get a hold on in the next few days… plus, get well from my 2 week long cough! 
Visit Mike
Joomla is a brilliant CMS one of my favorite, mainly because its open source.
It is full of so many features it is unbelevable, I would use it for any of my sites in a second, but for just blogging sites i would always recommend wordpress.
I think you will have loads of fun playing with joomla it really is worth the mess around with, I just wish i had more time to play with the coding.
Visit Kian Ann
Hey Mike!
Thanks… yes, I did try installing Joomla before and it is really a very powerful full fledged CMS. Really looking forward to learning more about it too.
Visit Razlan
Reading this post made me nostalgic. Before WordPress, I was using Blogger to run my first site… and as it becomes more complicated, I use multiple blogger blogs and interlink them to become one big site… right now the site, which is still very popular, continues to run on no less than 25 different blogger blogs. It’s a nightmare to manage… but then again, that’s when delegation should come into picture.
I still love WordPress. No experience with more complex CMS though. Test a few before and I thought Drupal was pretty promising.
Visit Kian Ann
Hey Razlan!
25 blogger blogs??! Man! “nightmare to manage” must be an understatment!
I heard of Drupal too – but I’m more familiar with Joomla at the moment. Then again, no harm playing around huh!